Nett: Community Rewards winners put different faces on what helping means

Home sales warming

It wouldn’t be the week before Christmas, I suppose, if Curtis Griffith, Cory Newsom and Norval Pollard didn’t lure me down to the basement of City Bank’s Griffith Center for another video guaranteed to make watchers choke up.

Yep, about halfway through this year’s Community Rewards video of the 10 honorees, I felt like I’d tried to swallow an alphabet block, and nobody around had arms long enough to do a proper Heimlich maneuver on me.

It was an interesting tableau of images, because it’s easy to think of help only in terms of working with society’s difficult issues — people who need more than a little boost to just get level in the world.

We think help is about assisting a stranger with a flat tire in the rain, the seniors stretching their food or energy dollars to unhealthy extremes.

It’s easy to not also see help is about supporting schools that are trying to make tomorrow’s world a better place by helping today’s kids find better values and make better use of the gray matter between their ears.

And we also saw funds to a couple of groups who speak up for our canine and feline companions who are sometimes cast aside as inconvenient or troublesome.

About 120 organizations were on this year’s City Bank ballot, representing causes great and small: community outreach organizations, groups dedicated to fighting a specific disease or disorder, activity and service groups.

And an interesting assortment emerged this year from a wide-open field of contenders, thanks to the bank’s decision to leave prior years’ winners on the sidelines.

That’s not to say those groups don’t need help. They do.

And apparently more people in this country are trying to help, financially and otherwise, according to a CAFAmerica report released earlier this week, which shows the U.S. leads the world in charitable giving.

The finding, contained in the “World Giving Index 2011” report, is based on Gallup Polling surveys of more than 150,000 people in 153 countries. The U.S. ranked fifth in the report last year.

The report draws on three individual charitable behaviors: donating money, volunteering time, and helping strangers. The surveys, done in the last month, found that two out of three Americans said they had given money to charities, more than two in five (43 percent) volunteered time, and 73 percent reported they’d done something to help a stranger.

I suspect a similar survey around the Hub City would find higher scores.

And that’s a good thing to hold in our hearts on this special day.

Home sales warming

Local existing home sales last month were again ahead of a year ago, but whether they’ll pass last year’s total will come down to the wire.

Local Realtors have already reached one other crossing point that’s probably not at risk of falling back: total dollar volume this year is about $11 million ahead of 2010 sales.

Sales totalled $25.5 million last month, against $23.8 million in November 2010, according to figures the local association released this week.

In the first 11 months of last year, Realtors closed 2,746 deals, while this year has seen 2,727 sales.

This year’s dollar volume to date was $386.6 million, up from nearly $376.1 million a year ago.

And agents came into December with some wind in their sails, with 151 sales pending at the end of last month, 15 more deals in the pipeline than a year ago.

Jobless rate improves

It’s been a while since the Lubbock-Crosby metropolitan statistical area’s unemployment rate has come in under 6 percent. November did it, as again the local economy added jobs faster than the civilian labor force grew.

The unemployment rate for the month stood at 5.5 percent, compared with 6.0 percent in October and 6.2 percent in November 2010.

Total employment grew from October by about 1,800 jobs, including a gain of 1,100 non-farming jobs, while the area’s labor force grew by an estimated 1,100 people.

The improvements, however, didn’t get Lubbock out of its place as holding the fourth-lowest jobless rate in the state. Midland continued to lead the way, with a 4.1 percent unemployment rate, followed by Amarillo (5.1 percent) and Odessa at 5.3 percent.

Across the larger South Plains Workforce Development Area, the jobless rate fell to 5.8 percent from 6.3 percent in October.